Using Minimum Viable Effort to Break the Activity-Atrophy Cycle
It’s all too easy to fall off the wagon when it comes to keeping up habits that you genuinely care about for self-improvement.
If you miss a day at the gym, it’s not uncommon to despair and scrap your whole fitness plan—even if you’ve been consistent for months! Similarly, if you’ve been learning a language steadily for months or years, missing a couple of days of language learning can be very demotivating.
We’ve all been there where life gets in the way, you divert from your routine, and suddenly you haven’t touched your target language in weeks or months (or years! 😬).
To make things worse, the longer you stay away from your self-improvement habit, the more difficult it is to begin again because you’ll have to face the fact that some (or most) of your hard-earned gains will have withered away.
It’s also human to avoid living a contradictory life. After all, if you believe that working out or learning a language is important to you, but your actions do not reflect this, your belief-action disconnect will create a keen sense of discomfort and stress that is hard to ignore.
All in all, if you feel that you can’t make progress toward your goals, the human defense mechanism is to not strive at all.
This is the typical way you avoid the discomfort of a conflicted identity until you find the time and summon the motivation to start again (which all too often is spurred by the panic of recognizing that significant gains have evaporated).
This very human phenomenon unfortunately traps you in a cycle of activity-atrophy that at best slows down your progress, or at worst, prevents you from reaching your goals.
However, there is a way to break the cycle without drastic alteration to your daily routine and still make steady progress toward your goals.
This solution is to change your rate of progress.
If you lower your efforts to the minimum amount required to sustain progress (where any lower and you’d just be standing still), you will minimize the burden that keeping up your habits will impose on your daily life. And in doing so you will be able to weather the sudden demands of life but still continue striving toward your goals—even as you find your free time diminishing (hello working adults and new parents!).
The activity-atrophy cycle is not caused by lack of time but by the arbitrary timeline you set for yourself to achieve the goals—you need to lose 10 pounds in two months, you want to be fluent in two years, etc. While aspirational goals are great, ambitious goals that require an unsustainable rate of progress are often the culprit for keeping you back.
The ironic reality is that making steady progress toward your goals often requires far, far less effort than you imagine.
Working out for 1 hour 3 times a week is all you need to steadily build strength. This isn’t just maintaining strength—we’re talking actual muscle growth. Similarly, making progress in a language takes only 15 minutes a day, 4 times a week. Again, we’re not talking about beginner stuff here—you can learn to read manga in Japanese with laughably small effort sustained over time.
If you put in the minimum viable effort to work out and learn a language, it will cost you at most 4 of the 168 hours you have in a week. Once you realize it only requires 2% of the total hours you have in a week to reach your goals, it’s hard to make excuses that your lack of free time is holding you back.
Sure, putting in only the minimum viable effort will take you longer to reach your goals than you might wish. You won’t go from zero to reading Japanese novels or benching 350 lbs in just 9 months. But you will eventually achieve your ambitious goals.
So if you find that you are stopping and starting on your self-improvement habits in an activity-atrophy cycle, take a moment to examine how many hours each week you were spending to progress toward your goals. I guarantee that you’ll find the effort you were putting in far exceeded the minimum viable effort required to reach that goal.
If you’re getting burned out or need the motivation to start again, try putting in the minimum viable effort and see what happens. You’ll be surprised by how consistent you will be, how your interest and motivation to reach your goal will increase, and most importantly, how much progress you will achieve in just a few short weeks.
Don’t compromise on your goals or on becoming the best version of yourself. But do give yourself a longer runway. Sure, it might take months or years to reach your ambitious goals. But if you’re moving toward them, your mind will be at peace and you will be flying soon enough.